136 Things not generally Known. 



rowed or climbed, or what it did ; and difficulties have pre- 

 sented themselves on all sides of the question. Some have 

 thought that it lived in trees as much larger than those which 

 now exist as the Megatherium itself is larger than the common 

 sloth. * This, however, is now known to be a mistake. It did 

 not climb trees it pulled them down ; and in order to do this 

 the hinder parts of its skeleton were made enormously strong, 

 and its prehensile fore-legs formed so as to give it a tremendous 

 power over any thing which it grasped. Dr. Buckland sug- 

 gested that animals which got their living in this way had 

 a very fair chance of having their heads broken. While Pro- 

 fessor Owen was still pondering over this difficulty, the skull 

 of a cognate animal, the Mylodon, came into his hands. Great 

 was his delight when he found that the mylodon not only had 

 his head broken, but broken in two different places, at two 

 different times ; and moreover so broken that the injury could 

 only have been inflicted by some such agent as a fallen tree. 

 The creature had recovered from the first blow, but had evi- 

 dently died of the second. This tribe had, as it turns out, 

 two skulls, an outer and an inner one given them, as it 

 would appear, expressly with a view to the very dangerous 

 method in which they were intended to obtain their necessary- 

 food. 



The dentition of the megatherium is curious. The ele- 

 phant gets teeth as he wants them. Nature provided for the 

 comfort of the megatherium in another way. It did not get 

 new teeth, but the old ones went on for ever growing as long 

 as the animal lived ; so that as fast as one grinding surface be- 

 came useless, another supplied its place. 



THE DINOTHEE1UM, OE TEEEIBLE BEAST. 



The family of herbivorous Cetaceans are connected with the 

 Pachydermata of the land by one of the most wonderful of all 

 the extinct creatures with which geologists have made us ac- 

 quainted. This is the Dinotherium, or Terrible Beast. The re- 

 mains of this animal were found in Miocene sands at Eppels- 

 heim, about forty miles from Darmstadt. It must have been 

 larger than the largest extinct or living elephant. The most 

 remarkable peculiarity of its structure is the enormous tusks, 

 curving downwards and terminating its lower jaw. It appears 

 to have lived in the water, where the immense weight of these 

 formidable appendages would not be so inconvenient as on 

 land. What these tusks were used for is a mystery ; but perhaps 

 they acted as pickaxes in digging up trees and shrubs, or as 



* The sloth only deserves its name when it is obliged to attempt to pioceed 

 along the ground ; when it has any thing which it can lay hold of it is agile 

 enough. 



